Blemish paused, looking from one Green to the other. “That can take time in Italy. It would be very uncomfortable for you, apart from anything else.”
On this note he took his departure, leaving Esposito still talking to his phone. It had been a good exit line but as he drove home a mood of self-doubt descended on him. It was not often that Blemish admitted weaknesses or fallings-off, even to Mildred; but when he got home again after this interview with the Greens he felt obliged to acknowledge that he had talked rather too much.
“I am pretty sure they will agree to have it done,” he said. “When it comes to foundations people tend to pay up; nobody likes to think that his property is liable to subsidence. It isn’t that, it’s the lapse in professionalism that bothers me. I went on too long from the business psychology viewpoint, and just at the wrong time, just when they said they were going to consider it.” He brooded for some moments, then said with deepened self-abasement, “It has always been a tendency of mine to gild the lily. When people say they are going to consider something, you show quiet confidence, you don’t start urging them, not at that point; it looks like weakness. These Greens somehow bring out the worst in me. I must say I don’t like that couple, I don’t find them simpatico at all.”
Seeing that her man was downcast and in need of reassurance, Mildred came padding toward him. “You are just tired, my love, that’s all,” she said. She nestled against him and he smelled her warm body odor and the mingled aromas of baked meats that came to him from her gingham apron and the steam of sauces that got into her hair. “I am quite sure you handled it all perfectly,” she said. “I wouldn’t think about those silly Greens a moment longer; they don’t sound the sort of people we would care to know.” To take his mind from things she nudged him gently with her pelvis. Blemish felt a stirring in his loins. “Shall we dress up tonight?” he said.
“Oh, yes, do let’s.”
First they had one of Mildred’s medieval dishes, one which she was trying out for the very first time, sweet-sour spiced rabbit. This was a rich dish, containing a quantity of pork dripping and currants and red wine.
“Delicious,” Blemish said, swaying his head on its long neck to show a sort of hypnotic bliss, like a charmed snake. “This will be a popular one with the customers. I’ll get fat if you go on feeding me at this rate.”
She regarded him fondly. “You’ll never get fat,” she said. “You are always on the go, morning till night, working to get the money together so we can have our dream house and our medieval restaurant just as we want them. No one could be a better breadwinner than you are.”
“Well, Milly, I do my best,” Blemish said.
Afterward they dressed up. Blemish had always gone in for this, even before meeting Mildred, when he was still living alone. He had loved being in costume as a child and could still remember every detail of his outfits of those days, his pirate eye patch, the tasseled fringes on his cowboy holster, the shiny buttons on his fireman’s tunic. Later it had become a need of his nature, feeding fantasies of success and achievement. By good fortune, in Mildred he had found an enthusiastic convert.
They had donned quite a variety of costumes in their time together. In the London days, Blemish had spent a fair amount of the money at the shops of theatrical costumiers. There had been a military phase, with Blemish as a guards officer and Mildred as a sort of regimental girl mascot in a pleated skirt and high boots. In their sporting days Blemish was a high-scoring striker in Liverpool colors and an excitingly constrictive jockstrap, while Mildred had worn a lacy Wimbledon getup with a sort of ballet skirt and white satin panties. They never transdressed; Mildred was traditional in her views and could not have respected a man who made himself effeminate.
Now of course, since the idea for the restaurant had come to them, everything was medieval. Blemish’s long legs were encased in stretch-nylon hose and he wore a skirted tunic and sported a codpiece—he had given up the jockstrap with reluctance. All these items had been fashioned by Mildred, who was good with her needle. She herself wore a tight-fitting, low-cut bodice that drew her breasts together and the sort of hooped skirt called a farthingale. This last was rather out of period but Mildred liked it as she wore nothing underneath, which gave a stimulating sense of air and freedom to all her lower parts.
As Blemish pursued a squealing Mildred around their double bed, finally brought her down, searched to disencumber her broad behind from the plastic hoops of the farthingale, as he maneuvered her into the position of readiness for the mode they both preferred—doggy-fashion they jokingly called it—as he felt himself more than filling out the medieval codpiece, triumph of conquest and restored commercial confidence caused him to put more than the usual emphasis into the ritual abuse he now heaped on his partner and to enjoy more keenly the ritual whimpering with which she answered it.
Ritter had reached the grove of canes some two thirds of the way down. The canes grew close together and the older ones were more than twice his height. As he crouched among them they obscured his view of the sky, enclosing him in a world of stems and roots and thickets of undergrowth. They leaned in all directions, snared and dragged down by thick ropes of bramble and creeper and wild vine. Streamers of bryony and honeysuckle laced through them.
It seemed to Ritter strangely silent within this enclave, among the burdened stems and the tuberous roots that showed here and there, pale and swollen, monstrous-looking, like the knuckles of some buried titan. In the very heart of it, through the debris of leaf mold and dead vegetation, new shoots of cane were thrusting up, a fresh and vivid green. The root system of canes was like the industry of spiders, about which he had been reading: aspects both of the terrible tenacity of nature. He thought for a while of this blind, silent struggle of plants. The struggle of animals was not a silent one, for the most part; but only man had the language to clothe his in abstractions.
His father’s face followed close upon this thought—these days, since he had started on his work of clearance, it lay in wait of him at every turn. He saw again that thin, sensitive mouth moving with words and the white petals on the desk and the white patches on the collar of the uniform. The fate of the hostages had been an abstract matter for his father. The essential truth of it did not lie in the killing by shooting of a randomly collected group of human beings and covering the bodies over with an explosion of dynamite. It lay in the Nordic Spirit combining with the tradition of Latin Christendom to make a New European Order.
The mouth moving, the words coming, his face … What was the expression of his face? Ritter could remember only two faces for his father: the one he had known in childhood, calm, close-shaven, vaguely kind; and the other, the face of the nursing home in Ulm, gaunt and staring. But the shape of the mouth was always the same, and the shape of the words. He had known, even at ten, that the shape was wrong, that his father’s words could not be the right ones, not because he detected flaws of fact or logic but because they bore no relation at all to Giuseppe’s tears or to the beginnings of hate in the lines of his friend’s face.
He crouched among the canes and began to reach into the ancient ramifications of bramble and blackthorn so as to cut them away at the base of the stems. It was his intention, before he stopped work that day, to clear all this undergrowth, free the canes, let air and light to them. Those that had rotted or been dragged out of shape by the creepers—some were bent almost into hoops—he would cut out, so allowing the new ones to grow straight. It was hot there in the hollow and the shade of the canes was too thin to give much protection from the afternoon sun. Ritter sweated heavily and his back ached from the squatting and reaching; but the discomfort was a fuel to his resolve, creating a steady rage against the obstinacy of life opposed to him, creating at the same time a vacancy of mind in which what he had learned and what he had already known, the things that proved the wrongness of the words, were repeated again, in dogged and familiar sequence.
The afternoon of March 23, 1944, the anniversary of the
founding of the fascist movement. Rome was under German occupation. Badoglio had made a separate peace. The Allies had landed in Sicily. I was ten years old and a pupil at the German School and I had a great friend called Giuseppe, who lived in the basement with his mother, the concierge. Giuseppe and his mother were sent away because of me.
On that afternoon a detachment of German security police was marching as usual toward the Viminale along the Via Rasella, a street lying between the Via delle Quattro Fontane and the Via del Traforo, in the heart of the city. SS troops of the Bozen Battalion. The Via Rasella has a steepish slope to it. Someone in the guise of a street cleaner waited halfway up with the kind of covered handcart used for collecting rubbish. In the handcart was a steel box containing twelve kilos of explosive and a package with another six kilos, attached to a short fuse. As the troops began the ascent someone below made a signal. The man waiting above lit the fuse and walked away. The timing was perfect: the cart blew up just as the troops drew level with it. Total deaths—from the explosion itself and from the grenades thrown down from windows at the fleeing survivors—thirty-three.
What happened then had very little to do with the founding of a New European Order. The Germans were frightened by the scale and boldness of the attack. There had already been some assassinations of fascist officials and on the first of that same month several hundred thousand Italian workers downed tools in Turin and Milan, bringing production to a standstill for a week. There was fear of a general uprising. The authorities decided upon reprisals. The only question was how many to kill. Settlement of this question involved most of the key German military and diplomatic officials in Italy. My father among them. My father knew, before he spoke to me that afternoon, he knew about the panic, he knew that Marshal Kesselring’s headquarters had informed Hitler, who had wanted at first to have fifty Italians shot for each German policeman killed. He knew that in subsequent phone calls this had been toned down to a ratio of ten to one.
Ritter paused in his work, and the silence of the place, which had been held off by his own small movements, descended on him. Somewhere below, near the stream, a bird sang briefly. My father knew all the time, he thought, with the same naive surprise he had felt when this had first come home to him, in the years after the war, when it had become possible to learn about such things. My father knew that Kesselring had been told by the SS chief in Rome, Kappler, that there were enough people already under sentence of death to make up the required number. He knew that this was a lie, that people were taken at random, that in the haste of rounding up the victims the quota of three hundred and thirty had been exceeded by five. My father knew this because his Italian colleague, the police official Pietro Caruso, with whom he was on close terms, had been responsible for selecting the victims …
This knowledge on his father’s part, unsuspected at the time, never referred to since, struck Ritter in retrospect as the most monstrous thing of all and a pervasive sense of treachery had gathered around and within it, deepened over the years by his sense of there being a pattern in the business, a pattern that was neat, symmetrical, universal. He repeated it to himself now: I betrayed Giuseppe and his mother by knowing something my father did not; my father added this knowledge of mine to his own much greater stock and betrayed me with it.
As his own knowledge of the killings at the Fosse Ardeatine had increased, so had this shape of treachery filled out, a development that had its own strong coloring of irony to his mind and one that during his career as an interpreter, seeing the power of words to conceal and distort, he had come to regard as a fact of life: whatever knowledge we achieve, it is always at the expense of faith.
There had of course been another kind of knowledge in his father’s mind at the time and this too Ritter had not realized until years later. It was the knowledge possessed by the German military command in that March of 1944. Even while the mouth moved and the words came and the almond blossom stirred on the desk, his father must have known that the war was as good as lost. The breakout from Anzio was only a few weeks away. In little more than two months Kesselring had abandoned Rome without a fight. The German headquarters staff, including his father, had been transferred north to Milan and he and his mother, together with other dependents of serving officers, had been sent back home to Germany.
Within a year Germany had surrendered, the war in Europe was over. The family moved to Argentina, where his father had connections. Here Ritter had continued with his Italian and added Spanish to it. He showed an unusual aptitude for languages, not merely an understanding of grammar and syntax but an ear for pitch and intonation and a natural mimetic faculty; even while still a schoolboy, he had understood that the way to knowledge of a language is through imitation of those whose native tongue it is, the gestures and modes of thought, that complex of habit and assumption that distinguishes one people from another.
They had not returned to Germany until 1953, when things had settled down. By then he was nineteen and virtually trilingual. It was this that had determined his choice of career, sent him to a school for interpreters at Heidelberg. A fortuitous accomplishment, seeming so natural to him as not to be much valued, except that it won praise. Certainly it had never been accompanied by any sense of esteem on his part for the profession itself, any sense that it was useful or contributed much to the well-being of his fellows. How could he have felt this, who had no belief even then in the power of words to convey truth? There had been the glamour of travel about it, that was all. He had taken what seemed the easy way but it had got harder and harder, until in the end it was no way at all.
He took refuge from this in a renewed sense of his father’s duplicity. Those resounding words had been no more than a cover for the rage of the defeated. You must have known, Ritter said to his father’s second face, the one where death showed already beneath the skin.
Blame and pity blended and became diffused among the stems of the canes, the beauty of their colors. These formed a subtle register of age, going from green through paling yellow to dark ivory and bone-white. To several were still attached the dead vine tendrils of some old cultivation, pale brown in color with a faint purplish tinge, hue of their death. They had curled around and clung and died in this clinging, the ultimate expression of their being. Now they were hard and brittle, like thin bone, impossible to separate from the stem.
He continued to hack and clip at the tangle of growths that bound the canes. Many were beyond saving, they had rotted in this long embrace; others were permanently disabled, twisted out of shape. But the younger shoots, freed from the cables that held them, swayed upright with slow rustling sounds that seemed like gratitude or relief.
They were bordered lower down by a dense and ancient screen of bramble with stems in some cases thicker than their own, spiked with dark red thorns an inch long and needle-sharp. The stems had to be clipped away close to the ground and pulled out, difficult work this as they were meshed with other vegetation and interlaced among themselves. Ritter persisted, despite his aching back and the numbers of small black flies that came with evening and showed a persistent interest in the exposed parts of his skin. The sun had already set when he was brought up short by a sudden falling away of the ground, a hollow running almost at right angles into the slope of the ravine. It was still partly obscured by the last of the brambles; but when these were cleared away he found himself looking down into the sides of a cave with a narrow ledge at the entrance. There had been some fall of earth farther inside, but the roof, roughly a meter in height, was held up by the arching roots of a tree stump and these, smoothed and polished by age, had kept the opening free.
The cavity was natural but it had been enlarged. Walls had been hollowed out into the bankside. There was a small, square-shaped recess some way in, with a litter of fire-blackened stones. If the fallen earth were cleared there would be a good two meters of sleeping space. It was clear to Ritter that he was looking at what had once been the den of a man.
“There is an iron
y in it,” Monti said, glancing around at the students assembled in his room. None of them looked as if they cared one way or another. The faces were turned to him, except that of the young man from Bologna, Millucci, who always kept his face turned away, as if reserving judgment; but they were quite unexpectant. “Yes, a strong element of irony,” he repeated.
At this one of the girls, Rosa Bellafante, made a brief entry in her notebook. Monti thought it probable that she had written just that one word, “irony.” “When you consider,” he said, “that Perugia throughout almost her entire history as an independent state, and particularly in the years of her greatness in the fourteenth century, was faithful to the Papacy, she was a consistently Guelph city, through all political vicissitudes, and this was the more remarkable in a period when warring factions and shifting alliances were the order of the day in the Central Italian States, when you consider this it seems ironical that she was to fall at last under a papal tyranny even more unjust and oppressive than the rule of the Baglioni family that had gone before.”
He paused on this, in the hope that some response not directly solicited by a question might be forthcoming. None came immediately and he was about to resume when the pale, quiet girl with beautiful legs, whose name he thought was Maria and who spoke rather seldom, said, “I think it is only ironical, I mean it can only be called ironical, if the Republic of Perugia kept faith with the Papacy out of principle and not for selfish reasons.”
“Selfish reasons?” It was touching to Monti, this childlike phrase applied to a period characterized by the extremest forms of arrogance and self-seeking and ambition. All the same, there was a point there. “Yes,” he said, “I see what you mean. If it was purely a matter of expediency that kept Perugia on the papal side, she was simply paid back in her own coin when the time came. But I think it is a mistake to consider the matter on a moral plane. The policy of states then as now is dictated by considerations of power and commercial advantage. The language of morality is used to conceal this, but when we go into things we will generally find self-interest to be the determining factor.”